My toes have been polished with cotton candy pink for at least a month now, and its starting to lose that kiddie carnival feel. So's my life. Though there is that moment, or a long string of them, when every fiber in my body knows something is going to happen but my brain hasn't caught on yet. Those times I feel like I'm on the ferris wheel again.The ferris wheel though, is that last thing on my mind as I sit on my standard issue rust colored couch and wait for you tonight. Instead I ponder my off-blue carpet and the clock on my stereo that gets a few minutes faster every night. Time drains a little too fast for reality, and far too quickly for me to get a handle on my life and my decisions. When I was eight years old the only decisions I had to make were which flavor snow cone to buy at the local town fair, and whether riding the giant slide on the burlap sack after eating it was worth throwing up. I have this blurry memory of a night at the carnival with my dad. I can't picture anything really in my mind now except for clear images of bubbling pink balloons floating above my head. I'd surrounded myself the balloons and laughed myself silly until my dad released them, accidentally, into the unclouded evening sky. When I was eight I could look up into the sky and see forever. Tonight there's a ceiling on the stars. Now that I'm a pseudo-grownup I forget sometimes that the stars actually do go on forever. Sometimes I can fool myself by painting a bright new coat of pink nail polish on my still childlike little toes, and pretend I can float like I used to. But that illusion only lasts so long and then I'm left as I am now, with the dull color fading, needing something else, and waiting for you again.
I open the door to your knock, and you're kind of frozen in this confident cardboard cutout pose, like if you move too soon maybe I won't notice the smooth lines of your leather jacket or of your blue jeans. So you don't move and I do notice. The definition in your arms is just enough to change the white t-shirt image from careless to deliberately seductive. You stand there bringing back memories of a dozen junior high crushes at gymnasium dances and I look to your feet. You're wearing your diligently unscuffed brown leather shoes, whose purchase you proudly documented to me earlier in the week. It gives you confidence, buying things like this, looking put together, and covering up any traces of vulnerability, especially in your feet. Feet are always the most vulnerable parts of a person because they control destiny. I think this way and yet somehow I always end up wearing sandals and being swept along unwittingly by life.
"How was the club?" Me, to you, trying to stall before I let you in this time.
"Butter?"
"Butter?" Me, confused as always.
"Yeah Butter. I know, weird name. It was alright."
"Sounds like it." Me, still stalling.
A little bit of eye contact between us for a minute dilutes the uncertainty, and makes what happens next relatively inevitable.
"You should come in." Me, giving in to your eyes once again.
Your eyes widen and you give me a little smile as I let you into the room. You watch me try to pull my sporadically curly blonde hair behind my ears nervously, and give you a smile that's trusting and uncertain at the same time. Your more consistently curly blonde hair catches my eye, and I laugh to myself thinking about whether I might actually have a "type", skinny blonde guys, as my friends sometimes tease me. Though there isn't anything about our relationship that I could typecast. The last uncomplicated memory I have of you is watching our Indiana Pacers lose a basketball game to the Knicks while we drank Coronas and yelled at the television. Somehow the same night, maybe twelve hours later, I found myself lying in bed letting your fingers delicately explore my arms and letting my mind go completely blank at how to explain you. It only took a split second for our flirting to turn not-so-harmless, and for the darkness in the room to become a glaringly obvious aphrodisiac. You lightly brushed my naked feet with your hand, my toenails pink, even though you said red was sexier. "You have nice feet," you said, remembering a bad pick up line you'd said was a joke that allows you to touch them a little more. But now I think I'm smiling as I look seemingly at you tonight in the midst of my daydream, and I check myself before I give away my emotions with my lips.
We sit on the couch as awkward friends and even more clumsy lovers. We grip our solid reality, try to ignore our confusion, and we find our way around attraction. We are rational.
"What time do you have class tomorrow?" You, being congenial.
"Umm…10, yeah 10"
"Ouch. Early."
"Yeah well it's not too bad. Could be worse."
We speak in awkward familiarities. You and I are connected, it seems, by some invisible line that traces our relationship and outlines its boundaries before it destroys them. We're eight year olds at a carnival who've tied our shoelaces together in play and now can't get them untangled. It's like the sticky cotton candy is all over our intertwined fingers.
"So what are you thinking about?" You, being subtle.
"Don't ask me that - I hate that question."
"That doesn't really help."
"Tell me about it."
We're on the couch and we've taken off our shoes now. My toes tingle with the idea that our solid shields are being penetrated somehow. When I look away, and towards my closet door, I can't see you but only your feet in the mirror. If I turned around I'd be giving in to the completely visceral feeling that is nonetheless passing between us in the air and letting you know my solidity is evaporating by the second. I'd become transparent.
"You know if we lived next door, we wouldn't be having this conversation." You, being direct.
"You think?"
"Yeah, because it would be totally out of the question - hallcest."
"It's kind of a little hard to think about this after talking about it so much."
"Okay, so let's ignore the talking."
But I stay safe, not ignoring anything, and absorbing your bare feet with everything I have, trying to determine from your toes what your mind is doing. If I only let myself see your feet it keeps me stable. I try to hope you're being rational too but I can't. Instead I secretly hope we both fall together into passionate spontaneity. I fix my hair again and pretend I'm not thinking about the next part of your leg that I can't see in the mirror.
"Should I put on some Otis Redding? I know you couldn't resist if I did. You'd give me that sly little grin…and look at the floor all bashful…" You, being charming and cute.
"I knew you were going to say that."
"Sorry, just trying to be charming and cute. How am I doing?"
"Pretty well." Me, with a sly little grin and a glance at the floor.
Today I painted my toenails red for you. The pink was chipping and I thought I could replace it with the red. I can be sexy.
You think so too because when I do turn around my feet end up in your lap and you eye my toes provocatively. You lift my face to kiss me because you like the red nail polish, and because you like the feeling that my solid feet are becoming as transparent as the rest of me when I'm in your arms. This time my lips do betray me. I can taste your tongue trying to decipher me, and I can feel each soft crack in your lips through the open pores in my tongue and on my neck where you are now. You connect all the parts of my body with your lips, and make me feel all of both of us through the warm air passing between our mouths. Your teeth gently grasp by bottom lip and then pull away from me, drawing me closer to you, and tempting me to kiss you harder. I do and your lips begin to feel like mine, and mine yours, until we're lying still wrapped in each other's arms, with our lips resting together, still breathing in each other. In your arms I stay for the rest of the night and while you sleep I lie next to you in bed awake. There's something about you in my bed and the feel of your smooth hands against my stomach under the cool sheets that makes my body resist sleep and hold on to its awareness of you for as long as it can. I feel your feet against mine and we are hopelessly tangled everywhere. I feel like if I move and every curve in your body is not pressed against mine, the knot will come undone and we'll be free of each other. Even though the pink balloons at the carnival of my childhood are already gone, I still feel a breathtaking anxiety that makes me afraid of releasing something and letting it float into the forever of the sky. Despite the overwhelming logic and consequence ridden nature of my adult life, when I'm with you I still feel like I'm riding the ferris wheel and dangling my feet over the edge. I like you making me question the natural order of things.
You kiss the back of my neck. I turn around to look at you and I think that logic doesn't really matter at the moment. It's cold in my room and if I wanted to be rational I would wear my socks to bed. But I don't. I want to touch your feet.
